I had tried to set up a dual boot on my windows 8 Dell Inspiron using Ubuntu 13.04 last year, which had kind of worked, but had all sorts of problems, with having to jump through hoops on each attempt to boot into Ubuntu.

I thought this article was exactly what I was looking for, to fix the booting and fix the other problem of the two OSs being unable to see each others' partitions.

The install from the DVD was unable to see the Windows partition, so I followed these instructions. Unfortunately, even realising that the "/" was missing didn't help, as it wiped out all the partitions on my hard drive.

So now I have the fun of restoring from backup and I don't think I'm going to bother with a dual boot this time.

Listicath wrote:The install from the DVD was unable to see the Windows partition, so I followed these instructions. Unfortunately, even realising that the "/" was missing didn't help, as it wiped out all the partitions on my hard drive.

When I read the Escape Windows article I looked at those brief instructions (Fix Windows detection issues) somewhat apprehensively as there was no explanation at all of the consequences of running those commands. The very words "wipe the GPT" sounded a bit foolhardy to me. There is absolutely no way on earth I would have run those commands without knowing a lot more about what they actually did.

I have recently set up a Windows 8.1/Ubuntu 14.04 dual boot on an HP laptop. Ubuntu's installation screen didn't detect Windows but I simply chose the "Something else" option - to manually create root and swap partitions in the space I had previously made available by shrinking the Windows C: partition in Windows Disk Management. Fortunately for me, after the installation had completed and the laptop rebooted, the Windows boot manager was available as an option on the Grub menu, so Ubuntu obviously must have detected Windows at some stage in the proceedings.